1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to a virtual conference system and a terminal apparatus therefor. In particular, the invention relates to a virtual conference system terminal apparatus used for holding a virtual conference and a virtual conference system for holding a virtual conference using a plurality of virtual conference system terminal apparatuses connected to each other via communication lines such as telephone lines.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, as shown in Japanese Patent Application 4-140990 there exists a visual telephone conference system in which a conference is constituted by attendance of a plurality of users at remote locations by connecting their terminal apparatuses using communication lines. According to this system, a user terminal apparatus to enable attendance at a visual telephone conference is equipped with a visual telephone set and a remote image transmission circuit. A conference can be held by displaying images of attendants in respective divided areas of a monitor screen of each terminal apparatus.
However, in the above conference system, to display faces of attendants on each terminal apparatus, video images obtained by photographing the faces of attendants are transmitted to the respective user terminal apparatuses. Since the video images thus taken have an enormous information quantity, time is required to input and output the video images, which are irrelevant to the progress of a conference. In addition, it is necessary to convert the transmitted signals to images. Therefore, this system has problems in that a conference hardly proceeds on a realtime basis and that each user terminal apparatus is costly, In each user terminal apparatus, attendants can be recognized easily by display of their faces in the respective divided areas of the screen. However, mere display of the faces cannot reflect an atmosphere of a conference, and cannot express various states that will occur in an actual conference.